Editorials
Unauthorized Terrors: A History and Defense of Horror Fan Films
From in-depth analysis to casual appreciation, there’s no wrong way to engage with art. However, some fans go the extra mile when demonstrating their love for certain franchises and characters by incorporating them into fanfiction. While these unauthorized stories are usually limited to the written word, a surprising number of die-hard fans are willing to face the technical and financial hurdles of film production in order to bring their original visions to life. Studios and mainstream audiences may look down on these projects, but they’re often the only thing standing between a beloved franchise and complete abandonment. That’s why I’d like to discuss the importance of horror fan films.
Fan films have been around since the dawn of cinema (even Murnau‘s Nosferatu can technically be considered an unauthorized fan adaptation of Bram Stoker‘s Dracula), but the questionable legality of these productions and limited access to proper equipment meant that they were once very rare. Most early examples of what we’d now call a fan film are either cheesy home recordings not meant for public consumption or passion projects funded by already-established artists.
Andy Warhol famously produced a fan film known as Batman Dracula, which pitted the world’s greatest detective against Stoker’s Count back in 1964. Receiving no support from DC comics, the completed film was ultimately shelved after a handful of screenings at art exhibits, with many considering it lost media until a few minutes of footage resurfaced in 2006. This was the fate of most fan productions at the time, though some amateur filmmakers managed to work around these rights issues.
For many years, George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead was the go-to subject for fan-made remakes, sequels and re-edits, as legal concerns are of little consequence when your source material was accidentally placed in the public domain. It can even be argued that every single zombie flick following the same undead rules as Night are technically fan-made homages paying tribute to Romero’s classic. While there’s no shortage of affectionate reinterpretations of the film, some of which were beloved by Romero himself, there are also a few unorthodox projects like James Riffel‘s NOTDOT that border on artistic vandalism.
Nothing like Bill Moseley to legitimize your fan film!
It’s a rare occurrence, but fan films have also been known to influence the future of big horror franchises. Bill Moseley is said to have scored his iconic role as Chop-Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 after impressing Tobe Hooper with the fan-made The Texas Chainsaw Manicure. Moseley would also star in William Hooper‘s lost/incomplete fan film All American Massacre, which supposedly featured Chop-Top recounting his life story to a news crew in a psychiatric hospital. In the Hellraiser films, Gary J. Tunnicliffe‘s phenomenal work on the unofficial Hellraiser: No More Souls would net him the director’s chair on Hellraiser: Judgment nearly 14 years later, setting a precedent for fan films as a tool for career advancement.
Of course, the whole appeal of fan films is that they’re made by fans for fans, and this community is only possible due to the rise of affordable home media devices and fan conventions. Having been provided with the means to produce these movies on a budget and like-minded audiences to share them with, amateur filmmakers were soon creating all sorts of unlicensed adaptations of popular media. While most of these productions involved notable Sci-Fi and comic-book characters, there were also a few horror-inspired crossovers like Sandy Collora‘s infamous Batman: Dead End.
A surprisingly spooky and well-directed yarn, Dead End sees Batman facing off against both Aliens and Predators in what some have claimed to be the most comic-accurate live-action interpretation of the character. While this bonkers crossover has some basis in comic-book lore, rights issues meant that this story could never have existed as an officially licensed film. This makes Dead End a perfect example of how fan films can go beyond studio limitations.
This “anything goes” mentality would really explode with the rise of internet culture. No longer limited to convention centers and niche festivals, fan films could reach a much wider audience and even be financed via the world wide web. Back in 2012, notorious producer Adi Shankar launched the “Bootleg Universe” as a way of exploring the limitless possibilities of these unauthorized productions. My personal favorite of these edgy fan films is Joe Lynch‘s Truth in Journalism, which re-interprets Marvel’s Venom as a sociopathic reporter in a found footage homage to Man Bites Dog.
When are we getting Batman vs Jason?
More recently, resources like Horror Fan Films have helped to keep track of new releases, and it appears that the community is only growing. From Chris R. Notarile‘s Krueger: Tales from Elm Street (a prequel web series about Freddy’s macabre origins) to Rick Gawel‘s Michael Myers: Absolute Evil (a feature-length mockumentary investigating the Halloween films from a True Crime perspective), the past decade has given us fan-made gems that subvert and explore big franchises in ways that probably wouldn’t fly under the traditional studio system.
In fact, some horror franchises have been kept alive by dedicated fan productions. With legal issues preventing new Friday the 13th sequels, Jason Voorhees’ only on-screen appearances since the 2009 remake have been in increasingly ambitious fan films. Vincente DiSanti‘s Never Hike Alone series is now considered the gold standard for fan-made media and Timothy Whitfield‘s Friday the 13th: The Obsession managed to insert a bit of meta-commentary into a movie series that desperately needed it. While producers still can’t figure out what to do with him, Jason’s spirit has been kept alive by these lovable bootleg projects.
Naturally, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows when it comes to fan films. Not only are these movies routinely plagued by inadequate budgets, cease-and-desist orders and a general lack of technical know-how, but even the best of them can still be criticized for wasting time and money that might have been better spent on completely original projects. While there’s a counterargument suggesting that the exposure granted by using established intellectual properties makes fan films a great way of showing off a filmmaker’s talents, very few fan film creators end up profiting from their projects. Ultimately, these movies work best as an expression of love for their source material, not as products. Weird little productions like Ryan Grulich‘s Georgie aren’t meant to make a profit, but to celebrate a community of like-minded fans.
Love ’em or hate ’em, fan films are an integral part of modern fandom culture, and no matter how hard corporations might try to prevent them from happening, they’ll always be there to explore ideas that big studios can’t. In an age when media conglomerates have become insanely protective of their intellectual properties, sometimes to the detriment of their own iconic characters, I think there’s something really special about non-profit productions made by amateurs who just want to have a scary good time.
Fan Films are as unkillable as slasher villains.
Despite what the higher-ups at Marvel would have you believe, Stan Lee’s original vision for Spider-Man was very different from the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler that fans ultimately got.
It was comics maestro Steve Ditko that turned him into the lovable web-head that we all know and love, though even that first draft of the character wasn’t exactly meant to be a child-friendly mascot. Ditko envisioned an uncanny arachnid-human hybrid whose freakish poses and dark costume would strike terror into the hearts of criminals, with the inclusion of web-shooters possibly having been a suggestion by Ditko’s roommate at the time, renowned fetish artist and bondage enthusiast Eric Stanton.
These more adult-oriented origins may have changed over the years, but one could argue that Spidey never completely lost his darker side. In fact, we’d eventually see several grim storylines that explored the horrific consequences of Spider-Man’s radioactive blood. While having his irradiated body fluids give Mary Jane cancer is likely the most terrifying of these yarns (track down Spider-Man: Reign if you’re up for a depressing read that was at one point set to be adapted to film by Michael Jackson), one of the most memorable horror-adjacent moments in these comics has to be the acceleration of Peter Parker’s mutation and the eventual introduction of Man-Spider – a storyline that appears to have been one of the main inspirations behind the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
I sincerely doubt that Marvel Studios is really going to give their toy-selling juggernaut a Cronenbergian rebrand, but the most recent trailer for Brand New Day suggests that the creative team is pulling from some surprisingly spooky source material in this latest superhero sequel. Specifically, the trailer makes it seem like the film is set to be a loose adaptation of the Neogenic Nightmare arc from Spider-Man: The Animated Series, commonly known as the best exploration of Spidey’s radioactive dark side that also features the most iconic version of Man-Spider.
If you’re wondering what these influences could mean for the upcoming film, I’d like to invite you to join me as we look back on some of the animated series’ most horror-tinged episodes.
A fourteen-episode story arc that made up the show’s second season, Neogenic Nightmare began airing in September of 1995. At this point, the series had already earned a reputation as the definitive version of Spider-Man despite dealing with absurd levels of censorship and executive meddling. It’s widely known at this point that this incarnation of Spidey was prohibited from ever punching his villains, and the studio even insisted that realistic guns should be replaced with futuristic laser weapons in order to avoid enraging concerned parents.
And that’s not even mentioning bizarre demands like setting up Hobgoblin as the original Goblin villain simply because the folks responsible for the toy-line had already prepared the character’s merchandise before scripts were even written.
At the end of the day. the show’s success mostly came down to John Semper’s excellent writing, with the (mostly) faithful recreation of the Spider-Man’s core principals and a handful of iconic storylines (coupled with an excellent cast behind the scenes) elevating a what was intended to be a kid’s show promoting ToyBiz products.
Naturally, the rampant cartoon censorship of the 90s couldn’t keep Semper from wanting to explore darker themes from his own favorite Spider-Man comics, and that’s how his team came up with a season-long re-imagining of iconic arcs like the Six-Arm Saga, The Mutant Agenda and even the first appearance of the Sinister Six. These stories would be enhanced with additional “dark” characters like Blade, The Punisher and even Morbius (though the latter had to exchange his vampiric blood-drinking for bizarre plasma-absorbing powers in order to conform to network guidelines).
If you haven’t yet seen it, the complete Neogenic Nightmare arc follows Spider-Man as he discovers that his mutation is progressing beyond his initial superpowers and threatening to turn him into a more monstrous hybrid. After developing extra arms, Spidey goes so far as to request help from both the X-Men and several other super-heroes as he becomes embroiled in a criminal conspiracy involving a team-up between some of his most iconic villains. The arc eventually introduces us to the show’s version of Man-Spider, which is depicted here as the monstrous final stage of the process which began when Peter was first bitten by that radioactive spider.
Personally, I think this werewolf-like addition to Spidey’s genetic curse is the best incarnation of Man-Spider that we’ve ever seen. This is because the six-armed body horror of it all adds even more weight to Peter’s decision to keep helping others regardless of what his powers may cost him, with the creature’s final rampage even giving the supporting cast a chance to help Spider-Man for a change. While I don’t hate the Morbius movie as much as some other comic fans, it’s a shame that Sony relegated that story to a solo film instead of later incorporating it into the Man-Spider saga like Neogenic Nightmare did.
Season two of the animated series ended up being an even bigger hit than the first, with fans loving the show’s take on an expanded Marvel Universe (which even included the ’90s X-Men cast) as well as the darker take on a more monstrous Spider-Man. That’s why it makes sense that the MCU’s return to street-level comic adventures would harken back to this particular storyline – especially since it appears that the Disney wishes to use the upcoming film as an opportunity to shine a light on other Marvel characters just like Semper did back in the day.
From what we can see in the trailer, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man appears to be going through his own additional transformations, including creepy fully black eyes and organic web-shooter, as well as the cocoon-building behavior previously seen in Marvel’s The Other arc in the comics. As I mentioned before, I doubt that the MCU will allow this particular cash cow to fully transform into a nightmarish spider freak that can scare away children, but there’s always a chance that the studio could surprise us with more horror elements. I’d also love to see the story explore Spidey’s mutation and use that as an excuse to formally introduce X-Men’s mutants into the MCU, especially since Sadie Sink is rumored to be playing Jean Grey in the flick.
However, even if Brand New Day doesn’t adapt as much of the Neogenic Nightmare as the promotional material has suggested, I’d argue that this particular season of Spider-Man: The Animated Series is still worth revisiting simply because it’s a great example of artists being able to work past network limitations in order to tell complex stories that approach full-on body-horror.
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